A recent innovation in the printing industry involves the use of print media with embedded radio frequency signatures in the form of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transponders or “tags” or similar devices. A tag or “RFID label” is a piece of label print media with an embedded RFID transponder in the label portion of the media. Such types of media may be used with a variety of existing printing methods.
It is a common requirement when printing labels that the printed image be properly registered or oriented to the media. This ensures an image is placed upon the appropriate label. RFID labels share this requirement with the added condition that the data programmed into the tags must also be properly associated with the image printed on the label.
For example, a sheet may have six identical labels symmetrically arranged in two columns of three labels each. This sheet may be fed with either end being the leading edge, and the resulting printed page will be identical. In such a case, a 180-degree rotation of the media produces an acceptable result. However, if only a subset of the labels contains an RFID tag (say, only one or two) and these tags are arranged in a nonsymmetrical manner, then a 180-degree rotation of the media will cause an unacceptable result, i.e. information will be printed on the wrong RFID label.
The relatively high cost of RFID tags further emphasizes the need for proper registration, both in increased costs and the time it takes to perform the image fixing and write operations on the RFID label. In addition, it is possible and even likely, to produce label media where the arrangement of labels is symmetric but the arrangement of RFID tags is not, further complicating the orientation problem.
Accordingly, as the printing on media with embedded RFID tags is rapidly becoming a growing area of label printing, there is a need to avoid the wastes associated with mis-orientations of media. It is desirable that the same efficiencies found in multi-label sheets of traditional label media be realized in RFID embedded media. The problem this presents is the need to correlate the printed data on the media sheet with the data programmed into each tag on the media. As such, a means of properly registering an image and tag data according to the orientation of the media to ensure correspondence between an image fixed on a label and data written to its corresponding RFID tag would provide numerous advantages.